Fitness Meme of the Week: Stop Giving Up

On this October Friday morning, here’s a thought that has kept many of us in the game just long enough to realize that staying in the game is the game:

Extremely cool fitness meme. You can check out a great collection of inspirational memes on this site – including this one. Thank you to “Funny Picture Clip” in the UK for putting together this great collection!

The best research out there on long-term weight loss tells us that those of us who reach our weight goal and maintain it for the long term tried more than once to lose weight. That makes perfect sense to me; we were learning as we went along. But somewhere along the road, we gave up. Then, further on down that road, we came back to it. This is normal.

But it’s also normal to say, you know what? I’m going to stay in the game. That’s what it takes to finally make your dreams come true. I still remember in my first month of Weight Watchers meetings, thinking to myself “I will not quit, no matter what.” Did I lose weight every single week? Not even close. Was I always thrilled to be there? Nope. Was I sometimes jealous of friends who seemed to not have weight problems? Of course.

The key to everything good that’s happened in my life in the last six years is that I stopped giving up. I showed up and did what I could do. Sometimes that plan worked out awesomely, and sometimes it was a little more on the “meh” side, but the bottom line is that I made a conscious decision that giving up was no longer an option.

It’s a variation on the “no safety nets” rule that many entrepreneurs follow. If you have a safety net, there’s the potential that you won’t have the kind of intensity and focus that you need in order to really build your business. There will always be the “safe thing” to do. And it can keep you from having the creativity to figure out how to make things work. Having a safety net makes a lot of sense in some situations (if your family depends on your income, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend risking your life savings, for example). But the safety net of saying “Well, I’ll give this fitness program a few weeks and see how it goes” and then dropping off…or that weight-loss program…or that graduate degree…Well, I think it just doesn’t get us anywhere.

What gets us from there to here, and beyond, is showing up, not giving up. And that’s the thought I want to leave you with this Friday morning. Have a great workout today. See you next week.

Yesterday’s Every48 workout: Nothing strenuous, but an hour in my community garden spent taking down tomato plants and beginning to get my plot ready for winter. A blissful hour to start the day outdoors.